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January 2 and we're back into work mode again ... not that we weren't working over the period between Christmas and New Year but it's not just the same is it. We tended to work at a more relaxed pace and bummed around a bit more but now holiday time is over and we're back into work mode.

Actually, who am I kidding? We would like to be back into work mode but these days it's not a thing we can switch off and then switch on. I look out the window now and even though the rain is pelting down I'd still like to be able to jump in the car and head down to the beach. That's not going to happen though ... apart from the fact that our high-tech car came home on the back of a truck the day before yesterday with a computer glitch that won't be fixed for a few days ... there's plenty of work to get done.

First up this morning is a meeting with a new mainstream client who wants to take his business online. That's always an exciting time for us because every new client is a challenge that we've never encountered before. Sure, the fundamentals of site design, marketing and search engine optimisation are the same but every business we deal with is different and to make it all work for each new client is never the same.

This guy's business, once it goes online, will need to score well in the search engines and the sites that we'll be competing with certainly look interesting. They're light on links, they're light on text and, at first glance, it shouldn't be too hard to outrank them but sometimes things are never quite as easy as they might look.

Late last year we built a site for another client who has two well-known brand items for sale at a local level. These are quite popular items and there are a lot of searches made here in Australia for those two items. We had done our research so we knew that competition for terms for those items was going to be tough and we were happy that our client really only wanted to rank well at the local level.

Well we got him top spot at the local level on Google and Yahoo almost as soon as the site went live and with only a very small number of inbound links from local sites. That was easy and the client was happy but then we also got him a top page one listing on Google for one of those brand-name items at the national level too. He was ecstatic ... but then he asked why we hadn't scored that sort of result for the other brand-name item that he was advertising on his site.

To make matters even more difficult this is a client who really has no idea about how search engines work and doesn't understand what it takes to get a page one listing. He now looks at that page one listing for one of his products and thinks that we must have failed because we didn't score that sort of listing for his other product.

He doesn't want to spend money on any further search engine optimisation work and he's not interested in doing anything about attracting some more inbound links either.

And why didn't we achieve a page one listing for his other product at the national level when we managed to do it for the first product? Well ... basically ... umm ... there is nothing obvious that we can point to. The sites that our client outranks for one of his products also sell the other product that our client sells and they are the ones that outrank him in listings for that product.

On page optimisation for both products on the site we built for our client are about the same ... on page optimisation - or what there is of it - on the sites that compete with our client's site is about the same. Inbound links don't seem to be the issue either so it remains a bit of a mystery.

Of course we would like to spend some time getting that page one ranking at the national level for both products but that's well beyond the original agreement we had when we built the site for the client. He got the local listings he wanted and that's definitely working for him ... and he does realizes that. But he still thinks that we could have done better.

I guess that sometimes success really can be a two-edged sword